Geography Archives: Africa

In 2015, United Nations member states adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which include an imperative to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” Yet, in the last four years, matters have deteriorated significantly.

Since 1996, activists in Xolobeni, a coastal region in South Africa, have been fighting a foreign mining conglomerate that learned that their ancestral lands happen to be rich in titanium. The anti-mining activists of Xolobeni, who have lost many comrades to hit squads, continue to struggle against this foreign company and its partners in the South African government. Given that their land is located in a global biodiversity hotspot, their struggle is the struggle of us all: it is the fight for water, soil, food, and air.

It’s going take a fully democratic anti-capitalist movement to fight climate change. The case of South Africa shows how long we have to go.

While environmentalist Greta Thunburg was at the UN, John Bellamy Foster, environmental sociologist and editor of the Monthly Review, was in Mauritius to discuss climate change. Weekly had an opportunity to talk with him.

On 19 December 2018, an uprising began in Sudan. This uprising would culminate in the removal of Sudan’s president–Omar al- Bashir–from power on 11 April 2019. The army staged a conser- vative military coup to abort the revolutionary tide and keep the same old policies.

More than seven million Kashmiris remain suffocated by the Indian government. The curfew that went into effect on 5 August is still in place. The media is not able to get into the state and offer a report of the situation. Telephone and internet services have been shut down.

Strikes have followed Sala all her life, as they followed Emma Mashinini. These are militants who understand that social divisions favour the wealthy, while social unity favours the poor. Those fires in the South African spazas mirror the attacks on the houses, schools, and health centres in Milagro Sala’s Jujuy province. Tears are not enough to put these fires out.

Benjamin Netanyahu announced on September 10 that he would annex the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea if re-elected.

“Economic policy globally has become heavily distorted in favor of the rich, with governments increasingly beholden to corporate interests, and thus highly resistant to progressive policies.”

Many people wonder why, when there is a quick rise of money in Lombard Street, it should be cheap on the Stock Exchange. It is cheap in the latter, because it has quickly changed in the former. The quick change makes people uncertain u. dann der easiest market ist der Stock Exchange „from day to day“. Discount houses etc deal dann möglichst wenig in bills, use it daher on the Stock Exchange, where they can have it at once, just because they do not feel sure enough of the future to lock up their resources till definite dates.

The US-China trade war has flared up again less than two weeks after US President Donald Trump delayed new tariffs of US$160 billion on Chinese imports until December, purportedly to avoid harming the holiday shopping season.

The Industrial & Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU)—a trade union, rural peasant movement, and urban squatters’ movement—formed on the docks in Cape Town in 1919. Within a decade, the ICU had expanded across Southern Africa without regard for national borders and counted people from various African countries and the Caribbean in its leadership, as well as people who were Indian and mixed race. The largely forgotten history of the ICU is well worth recovering in a time of escalating chauvinism and xenophobia. Our Dossier #20 offers an introduction to this extraordinary popular movement.

Blackthorn Safaris, based in Oswestry, hosts ‘canned’ hunts on an estate 40 miles north of the mining town of Kimberly, in South Africa’s Northern Cape district.

Palestinian resistance literature helped break the bounds of many of the literary taboos holding Arabic literature back. A whole new genre within a genre developed with the Palestinian intifada. It is a shame that there is no science fiction as future-oriented as Palestinian resistance literature is.

“To the tyrants who believed for a while that victory was theirs, we say, our people will rise up.. to recommence the journey and complete the revolution,” the SPA said as the protesters begin preparations to escalate.

Olivier van Beemen’s meticulous exposure of Heineken’s activities in Africa show the damage done by neo-colonial capitalism, argues Ellen Graubart

Disproportionate focus on corruption of national leaders distracts from the systemic theft of Ghana’s wealth.

A man lost in the desert needs water and lots of it. If instead, a rescuer gives him a really excellent novel and a comb, the desperate man will be confused and angry.

As the curate said, assessing a none-too-fresh boiled egg at breakfast: ‘It was good in parts.’

When the late South African artist Tito Zungu wanted to depict the world of the migrant labourer, he settled on the envelope. It was by infrequent letters that the migrant would be able to be in touch with family – letters dictated to professional letter writers at one end, which would be read out by professional letter readers at the other.